Not so much a question, more a wondering. When we're asked in a story to imagine, for instance, a waterfall, we can all do that easily. We may not all picture the exact same waterfall, but it's instantly imaginable. The same can be said for sounds - we all know what the blades of a helicopter sound like. But if we read, 'A strong aroma of coconut swept over him', does this even register with us? Do we instantly smell that coconut? Speaking for myself, I know that unless I make a conscious decision to imagine a given smell, it doesn't really connect with me. I know it's a pleasant smell, but that's as far as it goes.
It's our association to the smell that helps us build a scene, not that we're actually conjure up the smell somehow. If a city smells of garbage we know it's probably not very well kept. If you walk into a room that smells of something rotten you know there is something going on. Since we're talking fiction, someone is probably dead. In real life, someone probably forgot to empty the fridge. While it might not matter to all people,adding another sense to the mix might help elevating the scene. Making it less flat, I guess. If I read about someone smelling a strong aroma of coconut I would associate that with nausea. Not a pleasant smell to me
An interesting fact about smell and taste, they usually happen in conjunction with one of the other three primary senses (Sight, touch, hearing).
I think it's more about padding out the sensatory environment and making your character more real. Scents are a pretty big part of a person's life and memory. So they can be used as connectors -- a scent to remind them of a person or a place or a time. It can also be used to make a setting more real and explain a characters reaction or judgement. The more layers you add to a description can enhance your characters responses -- not just seeing a restaurant but smelling the grilling burgers -- mouth watering anticipation before tasting them (and if it's a person that hasn't eaten in days that intensifies the reality of the moment.) I remember in an Evan Hunter novel Last Summer a fantastic scent descriptor for a character was that the woman smelled of pumpkin guts. It's still stuck in my head all these years later. In a couple of words they made her seem odd, and somehow disgusting.
Maybe we're not all alike, but I know I do remember scents, to the extent that for a second or two when I read about them, I can actually SMELL them again. Or at least I think I can. However, it's probably not too helpful to come up with a written scent that not all that many people are familiar with. Chanel No. 5, for example. If I was familiar with that perfume, the image would work beautifully, but I don't think I've ever actually smelled it. Or, if I did, it didn't make much of an impression on me. Pumpkin guts (as @peachalulu mentioned) works fine for me, but I don't think it would work for somebody who has never eviscerated a pumpkin. So the more universal the memory you're evoking with smell, the better. Unlike a photo, or YouTube, you can't look a scent up online and discover what it's like. It does need to be something familiar to the reader, for it to take full effect.
Interesting answers. Thanks all. I stress I do understand the purpose of using smells in fiction, but I was curious as to how others perceive their use. Interesting that @Lemie would associate the smell of coconut as something bad, as in the scene where I use it, the aroma is supposed to be coming from a freshly showered woman.
I'm unclear here. Is the coconut smell actually present, or is the character purely imagining it? It sounds like the second, but something makes me not quite sure. I would say that we imagine smells, but the "...strong...swept..." seems like such a strong experience of imagination that I might stumble over it. I would include the smells in the memory, but perhaps less emphatically. Edited to add: Oh! Can the reader imagine smells? Yes. Absolutely. That is, I don't know if they would really have a mental sensation of the smell the way they have a mental image of the waterfall, but I think that functionally it's similar--we can still get into the character's experience of the smell.
I don't think you should worry about that, though, I think most people think it's a good scent. I just... can't stand it, or the flavor for that matter. And even us who don't like the smell will probably not view the scene much different. We'll just think that the character has poor taste!
Returning to add, now that I've been thinking about it: If you say, for example, "...the smell of the sea..." my mind will see the sea, visually, far more clearly than it will smell it, and see it more clearly than it would have if you had visually described it. It will also hear the sea (Whoosh. Whoosh. Seagull.) more clearly than it will smell it. And I'm thinking of a scene I wrote where someone was trapped with a threat, and it was fairly shruglike until I added a smell, and then that seemed to add the needed visual and the needed feeling of claustrophobia. That was me reading my own scene, of course, so I'm on both sides of the message and it may not count. So apparently for me, the mention of a smell is a trigger that puts me inside the scene, and then the smell itself is largely irrelevant.
I also remember reading 'the smell of the sea' for many years. It didn't evoke anything for me when I was younger, because I'd never been near the ocean. Now that I've spent lots of time near the sea, I 'can' smell it when people mention it in a story. It's very different from the smell of the Great Lakes, which I can also remember quite well. I do find that in order for a smell to register, though, I have to be reading slowly. If I whip past the words too quickly they register as words, as an effect I'm supposed to take on board, but I don't quite sink into them.
Good question. I'm thinking, no... not really. But scent is the strongest sense tied to memory, so I feel like maybe reading about a scent can trigger something, though we won't actually smell anything. Example: Back in my home town, the polling places on election day were always at my old elementary school, and the smell of the place when I walked through the doors always hit me like a sledgehammer. To say it took me back was an understatement. One smell of that joint and I was eight years old again. That would be hard to capture in prose, though, so I guess the smell trigger really only works if you have a personal memory as a prerequisite. The smell of the sea if always a good one. I grew up on the ocean and there's no smell quite like it. Ditto where I live now in the mountains surrounded by trees. It's like somebody hung pine scented air-fresheners in your nostrils. Of course, you don't smell it when you're there everyday, but when I visit my folks and bounce back and forth between the ocean and the woods I wonder how I can smell anything but the environment.
A lot of the scents I encounter in fiction are meaningless to me. Regular unleaded? Sure. Naptha? You bet. That rotten-eggs-and-metal stench you get after blowing off some orphanarium-grade Russian ammunition? Very familiar. Lilac and gooseberries? ...lemme get back to you, Andrzej Sapkowski. Thing is, the scent, or the name of the scent, at least, is still useful as a symbol for something. I still know that lilac and gooseberries is Yennefer's signature scent and brings about a strong emotional response in Geralt even if I myself have no clue what that smells like.
I think also the problem is the cliché of scent used in that simply saying the smell of the sea or I smelled her perfume doesn't really invoke anything in the reader anymore. They either need more contrast -- maybe the scent of the sea in someone's hair with no beach in sight or more details. The smell of the sea strong as the dead fish on its shores.
I agree but I disagree. That is, I would agree that, say, "The smell of food" is too generic. To me, the smell of the sea is a very distinctive smell. To a world traveler who's been to many seas, it would probably be too generic. Then again, I'm a perfume freak and would still be OK with 'the smell of perfume' because I would assume that it referred to one of the classic aldehydic perfumes. I would most likely be wrong; it would probably refer to some nightmarish modern concoction, but that would be OK, because it would still bring me into the moment.
I do see @peachalulu's point, in that the mention of a simple scent is a little... flat shall we say? All the same, some interesting insights, and it occurred to me while reading these replies that it also depends on the power of the smell. When @ChickenFreak mentioned the sea, I realised how quickly my mind conjures up this smell. It's weird, because our mind can't physically recreate the smell in a literal sense, but it's there on some other level... I know exactly what the sea smells like, but I can't smell it in a real sense .... argghh!! Very very weird.
I wonder if there could be a thing like face blindness and aphantasia, where someone could be literally incapable of imagining a smell? I can, but it's definitely one of my duller senses when compared to visualizing a scene or remembering a sound. It's not too hard to conceive of someone being unable to do it at all.
It's exactly the same for me, and it's this I find so fascinating. Let's forget imagining a scene, as it's obvious how we do that, but why is 'hearing' a sound easier than 'smelling' a scent? Neither of these things are memories formed by seeing, but imagining a smell is done on some very weird level. As I say, I know what the sea smells like, but when I 'think' about this smell, I'm not smelling it in a real sense, so how do I remember what it smells like? How do we 'recall' a smell, without that smell being present??
My comment is to be careful with smells. Smells are the mostly closely associated sense to memory, so individual readers may have different and much stronger emotions that you may expect.
I can recall lots of smells, coffee, chocolate, the way a third world city smells, the way the beach smells ... If one recalls sounds, one doesn't hear an audio recording in one's head, one imagines the sounds. Recalling/imagining smells is similar.
I can see this, but I still argue the way we recall a sound is slightly different. If I asked you to imagine the sound of a cuckoo, you can imagine it to the point of being able to do a passable impression of the sound, but this isn't the case with a smell. I'm not saying we can't recall smells, I'm saying I can't get my head around what it is we're recalling.
Smell is rather important to memory formation and emotional content of said memories. It is different from other senses, in how it goes straight to a more primitive part of the brain. I think people vary as to how an imagined smell connects with them. In general, I think being told to think about a smell makes it work more like an ordinary memory of other senses, but can’t give the special triggering that really smelling something can. Coconut: makes me think of over-strong scented sun-tan oil from summers as a kid, making coconut creme pie for my girlfriend twenty-something years ago, and eating Hula Pie at Duke’s Kauai with family just a few years ago.
Yes. It adds just a bit more flavor and realism to the characters and their environment. They can be foul, or pleasant odors or tastes (though some need a tad more description than others to really have an effect). It all depends on how they are related to the characters themselves that also plays a factor. Just like in real life, some things we find pleasant that others associate as disgusting. Though a major one in my WIP, is coffee. There is a part near the beginning where Marckus describes the unique flavor of the Chancellors coffee that she serves, as being earthy and robust like Mars itself. There is another part where Corlixia sees a Confederation jeep on fire and two bodies burning in it, and remembers the smell of burning flesh as being foul, despite the fact that in her war-frame she cannot smell the odor.
When @peachalulu mentioned the smell of sizzling hamburgers on the barbeque grill, I actually not only smelled that, but it made me hungry for one. (Fat chance, here in rainy Scotland.) Ditto the smell of pumpkin guts, although I kind of like that smell (reminds me of childhood Halloween), and it certainly wouldn't ...or wouldn't necessarily ...put me off that person. These smells are extremely specific, and are ones I have smelled before, so they work for me. If somebody said something about 'perfume' it wouldn't mean a lot. But the smell of lavender (which I detest) or roses (which I love) comes sharp and clear. Ditto lemon. I think for a smell to really evoke itself in the reader, it has to be very specific—and something the reader is familiar with.
In my opinion, I don't so much as...imagine smells. More often than not, I remember something from my childhood, a certain smell that just...makes me pretty happy. It can be just about anything but it's odd out of nowhere I can just remember a random smell that I haven't encountered in years.
A musician with developed aural capabilities may well experience something like a recording in her head. We don't tend to develop our nasal capabilities to the same degree, but perhaps it would be interesting to try.
